Using a computer to analyze and discern the meaning of the content of digital media assets, known as semantic understanding, is an important field for enabling the creation of an enriched user experience with these digital assets. One type of semantic understanding in the digital imaging realm is the analysis that leads to identifying the type of event that the user has captured such as a birthday party, a baseball game, a concert and many other types of events where images are captured. Typically, events such as these are recognized using a probabilistic graphic model that is learned using a set of training images to permit the computation of the probability that a newly analyzed image is of a certain event type. An example of this type of model is found in the published article of L-J. Li and L. Fei-Fei, What, where and who? Classifying event by scene and object recognition, Proceedings of ICCV, 2007.
There is a need to improve the recognition of event types beyond what is currently available via classical approaches such as Bayesian networks. Oftentimes, entries in a geo-referenced namespace database are specific enough to help classify an event. There is a need to gain additional semantic knowledge of a location to help classify an image captured at that location.